Ever since the iPad’s release in April 2010, Apple’s competitors have been scrambling to release a credible competitor. When announcing the iPad 2, Apple’s then CEO Steve Jobs bragged that the original iPad achieved above 90% market share, and he was right. After such a successful launch of not only a new product, but a new product category, other consumer electronics manufacturers recognized that the space was ripe for competition. After all, one product cannot serve the needs of all consumers. In technology, one size rarely fits all.
So far, the competition has attempted to copy the iPad’s success by copying the iPad itself. Tablets like the Motorola Xoom and the RIM’s Blackberry PlayBook resembled the iPad’s minimalist design and launched with their own competing apps or app stores. Largely, these competing tablets flopped (as in 2% of inventory sold), barely touching the iPad’s prominent position. Many of these competitors were priced similarly to the iPad ($500-800), but retailers have been forced to reduce the prices of iPad competitors—in some cases, dramatically—simply to move them off the shelves. Most of these tablets have shipped with similar features, in some cases more than the iPad, yet none has stolen the crown; they’re not even close.
But if TechCrunch’s MG Siegler is to be believed, there will soon be a new Amazon Kindle, one with a full-color, 7″ capacitive touchscreen. It will run a version of Google’s Android operating system that has been entirely rejiggered for Amazon, but you won’t see any Google-branded apps on it. Why might it succeed where the others have failed? Because it will hook in so nicely with Amazon’s existing services and comes with a free subscription to Amazon Prime. Want to read e-books? It will have the Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. Want to access all your music on the go? It will have Amazon’s Cloud Player. Want to watch movies on your tablet? It will have Amazon’s Instant Video. This deep connection with Amazon’s cloud-based services is key. As anyone who regularly uses a tablet without a lot of disk space can tell you, transferring content onto the device (and managing it once it is loaded) can be a hassle, particularly for large files like videos.
Consider the price – $250. That’s half the price of the cheapest iPad, and the same price as Barnes & Noble’s color Nook e-reader. Now that Amazon sells more Kindle books than paper books, advancing its position in the tablet market with this new Kindle will be an important piece of its market strategy. You can bet this new Kindle will be heavily promoted on Amazon.com, one of the most heavily visited sites on the web, and the Kindle is already a wildly popular device and service.
For a newcomer to take on the iPad, it will need to sell its product along with a story, a reason for a typical consumer to choose it over an iPad. This new Kindle can offer compelling features the iPad lacks (streaming music, better e-bookstore), for half the price. Fighting against the wildly successful iPad, Amazon will have an uphill battle, but at least this new Kindle will start out with the full momentum of Amazon’s popular services. Although it is unlikely anything can slow down Apple in the short term, expect Amazon to set a new standard for second place.